A
common and questionable idea has it that on television the close-up
shot is king. If it was true, the man who one day shouted “I don’t want
to see nose hair on a fifteen meter screen!” would not stand a chance
on the small screen. John Ford wasn’t very fond of close-ups, or of
expository scenes, which amounts to the same thing. He shot very
quickly and spent only 28 days directing She Wore a Yellow Ribbon(and
not La charge héroïque, the ill-translated and stupid French title). It
was in 1949; he was his own producer and did whatever he fancied. Forty
one years later, the film ‘passes’ perfectly from the big to the small
screen (on Channel 1). Elementary, you say? Not quite.

Gilles
Deleuze one day reminded the youngsters of the FEMIS school of cinema
that their work as filmmakers would consist in producing ‘blocks of
duration-movement’. And if Ford’s blocks remain so perfect, it’s
because they respect the most elementary of golden numbers: they only
last the time it takes a practised eye to see everything they contain
(1). The time to see all there is to see is the right duration and the
right movement for an eye as disciplined in the art of looking as
Ford’s horsemen are in the art of riding.

A principle so
simple that it allowed Ford to complicate, refine and even convolute
things while always giving a feeling of timeless classicism. It isn’t
the action which determines duration, it’s the perception of an ideal
spectator, of a scout who would see from afar all that there is to see
(but nothing more).

Rapid contemplation is the Ford
paradox. It’s impossible to watch his movies with a lazy eye because we
then no longer see anything (except stories of romantic soldiers). The
eye must be sharp because in any image of a Ford’s film, there is
likely to be a few tenths of a second of pure contemplation before the
action starts. Someone goes out a wood shack or leaves the frame, and
there are red clouds over a cemetery, a horse abandoned in the right
hand corner of the image, the blue swarming of the cavalry, the
distraught faces of two women: things to be seen at the very beginning
of a shot, because they won’t be a ‘second time’ (too bad for the
sluggish eyes).

Ford is one of the great artists of
cinema. Not only because of the composition and the light of his shots
but more deeply, because he shoots so quickly that he makes two movies
at the same time: a movie to ward of time (stretching his stories out
of fear of ending) and another to save the moment (the moment of the
landscape, two seconds before the action). He enjoys the show ‘before’
(2). So with Ford there is not point looking for characters who, in
front of a beautiful landscape, would say “How beautiful!” The
character is not to whisper to the spectator what he should see. That
would be immoral.

And the characters are busy enough
postponing retirement and the end of the twists and turns of the story.
This theme emerges in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and will keep coming
back. Ford’s characters (soldiers included) are but the traveling
acrobats of their beliefs – beliefs which tend less and less to lead to
promise lands, even if they draw the figure of riders on a bright red
sunset sky or in the moonlight. This image is in She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon of course. This circular parade, going from left to right, is
collective and never-ending.

But there is another
movement, more mysterious, which comes from the deep end of the shot,
and always emerges in the middle of the image (3). As if this film
maker, who had built everything on the refusal of close-ups and
expository scenes, on occasion let something come toward his
characters. Thus we find a close-up in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. We can
see Nathan Brittles-John Wayne-Raymond Loyer (4) talking to his wife,
long dead and buried two feet away, explaining that he has only six
days left before retirement and that hasn’t made any decisions. Then
the shadow of a woman appears on the grave. It’s only a harmless young
girl but for those who have learned to watch Ford properly, this brief
moment frightens. It’s the past that comes back in the middle of the
image, without warning, ‘àla Ford’. Needless to say that when an image
has not only edges but also a heart, the small screen welcomes it with
due consideration.

(1) I got this remark from the Portuguese film maker A.P. Vasconcelos.

(2)
We could venture to say that, reversely, a film maker taking stock to
show us the beauty of the landscape ‘after’ is immoral.

(3)
The author of the article has reaffirmed his ‘Fordism’ at the page 62
of the excellent special issue of Cahiers du cinéma on John Ford

(4) Raymond Loyer is the French voice of John Wayne in dubbed movies (translator’s note).

- - - - - - - - Translation
by Laurent Kretzschmar. The French version of this text was originally
published in Liberation, 18 November 1988 and can be found in Serge
Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Aléas
(http://www.aleas.fr/), 1997.